Other Men
by ElapsedSpiralling
Summary: Bruce helps others to help themselves.  This is an awful summary, but anything more will rob the fic of the teeny, tiny bit of predictable plot it has . Light Bruce/Jack Joker  slash. TDK-ish characterisation.


**Other Men**

Thomas Wayne was a firm advocate of helping men and women to help themselves. The empowerment of others through providing means, a livelihood, was a far nobler cause to support than merely offering hand-outs and charity. As his son, Bruce Wayne naturally felt the same. In his dream-like existence, drifting from theatres to benefits, to exclusive island getaway weekends to balls and back again, Bruce Wayne at least attempted to continue his father's sentiments in his daily goings on. Some men, of course, could dropkick rapists and head-butt mobsters, but Bruce Wayne, at least, could get his shoes shined. He could drop a hundred dollars in the case of an unsuspecting saxophonist. He could buy enough pastries from a family-owned bakery to feed a football team only to hand the snacks over to the nearest homeless shelter.

Today, he could go and get a shave. Bruce had strong memories of his father eagerly showing him the bottom floor of Wayne Tower. The whole space, much to the despair and chagrin of the CEO of Wayne Enterprises, had been reserved for small businesses. The pair, father and son, had walked along the marbled and curiously opulent surroundings. Bruce recalled peering in the window of each shop as the men inside had sawed, drilled, hammered, buffed windows and readied their shops for opening. There had been a pet shop, Bruce remembered, with a large cage filled with a writhing mess of ferrets. There were hardware stores, a candy store and a grocer. One of the few stores that had already opened at that time, with its door flung wide, was a barber's shop. The red and white pole that jutted from the shop's façade had looked glossy and new as peppermint candy.

Thomas Wayne had had a shave that day, whilst Bruce had sat, swinging his feet and studying his surroundings. There were countless bottles and jars with names that meant very little to the young boy. He remembered how his attention had been drawn back to his father in momentary alarm when he had seen the waist-coated shop owner take a sharp, new blade to his father's face. Thomas Wayne had shot a sideways glance at his son and huffed a quiet laugh, careful to keep still.

"Bruce, what did I tell you about staying up and watching television? There's all sorts of nasty programmes that you shouldn't be seeing at your age. Plenty of time to give yourself chills when you're older."

"I haven't been!" and it was, more or less, true. Bruce had seen a snippet of some grizzly horror movie, hidden ingeniously under a woollen blanket thrown over him and his widescreen television to mask the light coming from the glowing screen. That film had been about vampires and the blood, he remembered, had resembled cola.

What the boy had been put in mind of, rather, were books in the vast library at the Manor. Ones he had had to haul carefully down from a high shelf, creeping back down the ladder with the dusty volumes caught under his arm. He remembered parcels with severed thumbs inside, men with twisted mouths. He tried to smile, reassured, at his father but the entire length of the shave Bruce had allowed his gaze to flit back and forth: between his father's jovial face, the blade and the intent expression on the moustached barber.

"There," Thomas Wayne paid, clasping a hand over the barber's to ensure that no squawk of protest came from the man at the rather obscene price he chose. Mr Wayne took Bruce's hand and headed back out into the quiet marbled hall, "Very presentable, don't you think Bruce? The board will have to cut me some slack if I turn up looking this dapper, don't you think?"

Bruce gave a nod, catching the eye of a worker tacking a sign to the front of another shop: the man turned to give a solemn nod that made Bruce look back shyly to his father. Thomas Wayne only squeezed his son's hand harder, his practically perennial smile wider still.

"Tell you what Bruce," he said, "When it's time for you to get your first shave, we'll come here and get one together, how about that?"

"But there's only one man working there," Bruce said in confusion, "We'd have to wait turns."

"But having this shop will help him to help himself, Bruce," Thomas Wayne said with utter assurance, "I'll bet by the time you're old enough he'll have expanded into another shop. And we'll both get shaves and you'll break some hearts. Sound good?"

Bruce had nodded, smiling widely at the prospect.

It hadn't happened, of course. But that didn't stop Bruce Wayne from honouring his father and ensuring that he did his best to look respectable: for benefits, for the board. He might not have been the smartest, most financially savvy of men but he could be a figurehead with a smooth, clean shaven face that broke hearts. Some men could strike fear into hearts, could solve problems through inspiring utter horror in those who deserved only to feel terror but Bruce Wayne could get a shave at the barber shop under Wayne Tower. He could do that much.

The marble floor was scuffed now: people had ridden bikes through the building, using it as a shortcut. The floors were littered too, with bottles and cigarettes butts but also with household waste. Undoubtedly some shop owners lived in their shops and the sight of empty bread wrappers and rotten fruit outside doors said as much. Bruce heard how his footsteps sounded firm and heavier now, with a constant, unfaltering rhythm. They were his father's footsteps and he felt certain, impossibly so, that he traced the same path as his father had always done as he had passed beneath the Tower.

His father had been right on one count: the barber had gone on to hire an employee. He had not expanded, however. Rather, the peppermint of the barber pole had become cracked and lost its pearlescent white like an abused tooth jutting from the shop wall.

The man, the same barber with a hunch to his shoulders and whiter, wilder eyebrows, gave that same solemn nod upon Bruce's entering the shop but with a mechanical, almost a sneering quality as compared with the genuine pleasure the motion had held for his father. The barber had turned back to his own customer and allowed a young blond man to direct Bruce to another dilapidated chair. The chair back gave and groaned disconcertingly beneath his weight.

Bruce Wayne was no conversationalist: he could offer a glib, but more often idiotic or naïve comment at a fund-raiser, but he couldn't chat. His father had always been able to talk, eagerly and happily to the average man: about sports, politics, the weather. He would draw laughs. Bruce felt as though having come down from the rarefied airs of Wayne Manor had left him with no breath and nothing to offer in the basement of Wayne Tower. He took to idly humming as the barber prepared a towel for him. Some men could hiss and spit and snarl choice words at the exact right moment to cause anguish, to get a result or to save a life. Bruce Wayne had humming and he even allowed his feet a waggle (the footrest on his barber's seat had long since dropped off).

The towel was placed on his face tenderly. Bruce stopped his humming to avoid sucking in the fronds of the fabric. Death by accidental waterboarding at a barber shop in Midtown seemed a depressingly Bruce Wayne way to go. He tapped a hand on one arm rest instead whilst the heat pricked sweat from his skin, the lemony scent from the fabric tickling his nostrils. Like magic, the towel was whisked away and a monochromatic brush came into view, sliding and slipping thick, cream-like foam onto his cheeks and chin.

"I came here with my dad," he said, tasting a little foam as he did so. He received a grunt of apparent dis-interest.

"It's changed."

"Yeah," he was offered. Bruce let his eyes fall shut and the sensation of the brush grew, whisking and spinning on his skin like the roller in a car wash. He felt the brush slither up to one ear, then the other, sneak under his chin and then, disappear. His eyes only slipped open again when he heard the metallic clatter of a knife being snapped up from a countertop.

Bruce Wayne was, of course, ideal hostage material: rich, dumb and politically valuable. He was very much aware of this (and was made all the more aware of it at every board meeting by various chiefs of various Wayne Enterprise departments who would insist he found out _what_ nation a party was planned to take place _before_ getting on board a private jet). Bruce had, as a result, an aversion to blades and weapons. It was sensible, self-preserving, the flinch that would run through him, even at the sight of a razor blade in the hands of a barber. Other men had far more right to be vigilant for blades and guns. Those with enemies and those who drove others to madness with their drive and their cause. Those whose existent brought about biblical teeth gnashing and garment rending with their name or presence alone. Bruce Wayne just had to be sensible and aware.

The blade was brought down on his cheek and he heard the snick and the grit of his stubble on the metal as it smoothly decapitated each strand of hair. Bruce kept his eyes trained on the blur of a face above him. The blade-holding hand gathered momentum and the razor travelled deftly across his face: cheek to jaw, jaw to chin, chin to-

"Hey, slow down," Bruce insisted at last, attempted to dodge the blade only for the hand cupping the other side of his head to keep him in place, "I didn't ask for a Van Gogh special. Do you know who I am?"

"Oh, I know who you are," the voice came.

Bruce Wayne was not at all observant and there were various reasons for that. One was he was that he had defied his genes to grow up as dumb as a rock. He happily enjoyed the indignant look on the faces of people who were far too reverent of his money to say anything unpleasant to him as he asked for their name for the third time in an evening. The other reason was the sheer number of functions he attended and the monotonous parade of white, prissy, prim and proper faces that began to blend after a while. It could have been a Cecilia or a Felicity. The chances were it wouldn't matter, at any rate. Other men knew men by their breathing alone, by one long, considered look in a darkened alley. Bruce brought the figure standing over him into better focus and stared.

"I thought you might," Bruce murmured, the blade running along his upper lip making anything more an impossibility.

"I've seen you around," the barber insisted, leaning down closer to take care of the difficult crease where jaw became neck. Bruce allowed his eyes to fall closed, breath caught in his throat because he was dumb, dumb as a rock, other men wouldn't dare take their eyes off-

"Yeah?" Bruce all but slurred.

"I'm your chauffeur," the voice came by his ear (because the man was shaving the spot by his ear), then by his pursed lips (because he had chosen to catch a few small, missed hairs there), "I'm your waiter. I'm your bell boy."

"Moonlight a lot, huh?"

"Moonlight's my favourite, Mr Wayne."

Bruce let his eyes open at half-mast and he was met with the most beautiful pair of green eyes he had ever seen. Other men had seen such horrendous, destroyed, decimated approximations of humanity a thousand times, without clever latex make up and without clean, curled blond hair and impeccably shaven dimples. Bruce Wayne just thought the eyes were some of the prettiest he had ever seen. Green like grass (Bruce Wayne was no poet). Others might have thought first of decay or the filth that gathers on stagnated water.

"Well that's nice," Bruce drawled, following the young man's movements as he went to run a tap and drop another towel into the icy water croaking from the water-spotted spout.

"It works for me," the man said over his shoulder (other men would have recognised that waistcoat, that beautifully tailored shirt), "I'm a master of all trades, jack of none."

"Isn't it the other way around?" Bruce mumbled as the bitterly cold towel was carefully wrapped about his cheeks.

"Not the way I do it," the voice whispered by his ear.

"I'm a one-trick pony," Bruce murmured as the barber came to stand in front of him. He crouched and took Bruce's chin in hand and made a show of tilting the man's face in every direction, slowly, easing each motion from the billionaire. Their eyes were locked with every change of direction, every tilt and dip.

"But you do your trick so well," the barber smiled. Other man would have had the same reaction as Bruce at that smile: the bottom of his stomach dropped out. Bruce did not close his eyes.

A little aftershave was patted onto his skin and then Bruce was gestured to the till by the man like a waiter directing a diner, like an usher directing a playgoer, like an air steward directing the passenger on a private jet to god knew where.

Bruce handed over a wad of bills, clapping his hand over the barber's to stifle any squawks of protest at the obscene price he had chosen to pay. The barber's free hand settled on top of his own and dragged on knuckles that sported scabs and cuts that other men's hands ought to have. Men who worked with their hands. Bruce's eyes settled on the cheekbone of the barber and saw, through meticulously blended concealer the dark circles, the broken capillaries under thin skin and the deep, blue-purple kiss of knuckles on one cheekbone.

"Well, Jack," Bruce thought it was a funny way to put the man down after his bombastic claims (other men knew other reasons to call him Jack), "Maybe I'll see you tonight."

Bruce flashed a smile that was nothing like his father's generous and optimistic one. It was the smile that broke hearts and it was tinged by other things. Unlike his father's, it never reached his heart-breakingly brown eyes.

The barber let go of Bruce's hand, fingertips slipping away over each dip of the billionaire's bones and joints.

"Maybe, maybe not," the barber said as he placed the bills carefully into the till, Bruce already out the door, "But I'll certainly see you."


End file.
